Increasing learning conversation and literacy through blogging and commenting | Teacher Inquiry 2020

Accelerated learning, the holy grail being sought by schools in the Manaiakalani cluster. At Panmure Bridge School, our data has shown acceleration particularly in Writing. This acceleration has been aided in recent years thanks to a flattening of the 'Summer Slide', related to implementation of the Summer Learning Journey (SLJ). Grant Oglivie and Greg Wong's joint teacher inquiry for 2020 is to increase students' other forms of literacy, i.e. reading and oral, by leveraging learning conversations through blogging and commenting as used in the SLJ. The first step in this process is to codify and teach a system for blogging, then do the same for commenting.

The system for blog posting has been decided as using the recount, information report, and explanation text types taught in the Writing curriculum. There are several reasons for using these text types rather than developing another structure. Using these text types will compound on Writing lessons, providing students and teachers with more opportunity to refine students' writing techniques and find areas needing improvement. Working on these text types so frequently frees up Writing lessons to be dedicated to the grammar, style development, and the remaining text types (narrative, persuasion, and procedural). Finally, areas to be commented on are made available when students have written their posts in a well structured and thought out manner.

Evidence from students' drafting process will be used to inform the exact teaching points needed and when to continue to each phase. This process is likely to take a whole school year and possibly reach into 2021 to establish good routines in this year's year 5 students. Small scale improvements are likely to be seen by mid 2020, with long term improvements appearing as students reach Years 7 & 8.

Vocabulary and non-fiction texts

Across the board in LS1, but especially among the lower ability readers, there seems to be a big deficit in vocabulary (in all learning areas). To alleviate the deficit this year, Grant and I are explicitly teaching new vocabulary to students and making them use it in context to strengthen the understanding.

I have also made a push in reading to read non-fiction books on a wide range of topics. Many of the topics are ones the children have never come across or talked about in detail. Coupled with explicit vocabulary teaching, I hope this will expand the children's prior knowledge and vocabulary.

To work in conjunction with the reading of non fiction texts, I have a series of tasks for students to complete after reading a text. The tasks range from simple tasks that would be used in the junior school to more complex tasks such as creating a hierarchy graph of ideas in the text.

What the Data Says

As eluded to in the previous post we are selecting 2 groups for our collaborative inquiry this year.

Collaborative Inquiry

With the change in direction of the cluster and school with PLD, preconceived ideas and the group of student in LS1 we decided to run a collaborative inquiry this year.

What does this mean??

We will target oral language through Reading, Writing and Maths.
We are also focusing on improving Maths attainment through integrated topics using the HPE, Arts and Oral language curriculums.

The way the majority of content is covered is in differentiated groups. This will mean the target groups get "hit" from all different directions, from both teachers throughout the year.

We are also going to have 2 focus groups.  One group which teachers traditionally always focus on, the group who are "nearly" there but need a push. The second group is going to be a group that is operating ahead of where they need to be.

The rational behind this is to give a wider range of approaches a go, and to keep ourselves thinking, reflecting and planning throughout all lessons. An observation of previous years inquiries was that too much focus was put in to a specific area. This in turn frustrated us as there seemed to be no escaping the pattern of focusing below the chronological level and when shifts weren't obvious teaching self esteem suffered.

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